Birdcloud

Birdcloud is Jasmin Kaset and Makenzie Green, a pair who met in a place called Murfreesboro and who, since 2009, have used things like booze and sacrilege to make very modern country music. The duo write songs about what Sarah Palin deemed “the real America,” that unsung republic of countrified interstices stretching from coast to coast between cities. Kaset and Green’s America is a nation of indulgent reprobates and boastful imbeciles, laughing maniacs and horny high school dropouts— the desperate, absurd place we all inhabit in one way or another. The band’s music is the ravenous id of today’s commercial country sound, and in place of the pandering and polished banality of Nashville’s Music Row is a savagely honest depiction of “real Americans,” where a teenage evangelical designates her vagina (alone among her orifices) to Christ; a Desert Storm veteran dispenses ancient wisdom while driving drunk and toppling birdbaths in the suburbs; a coked up blackout drunk on a spree fellates a rodeo clown and tells her friend’s children that Santa doesn’t exist. These characters are characters in both senses of the word: 1) eccentrics with notoriously outsized personalities, as well as 2) complexly three-dimensional literary creations. The complicated sensation of listening to Birdcloud’s music—the simultaneous urge to laugh, vomit, and maybe break down and cry a little at how familiar and sad and true it all is—has won the band fans across the lower 48, stupefying and sickening audiences in equal measure.